THE GROWTH SERIES
The Growth series are workshops aimed at more established creative professionals, freelancers, creative businesses, and arts organisations. Each workshop builds on a topic from the previous series and takes the learning one step forward towards a sustainable and successful professional life in the creative industries.
As with all our workshops, each one can be delivered as a single 2-hour unit or combined with others to create a bespoke learning program for your participants. All workshops can be delivered in person or online.
Deal or No Deal
How do you say no? How do you negotiate your fees, and manage your professional relationships? Communication, mediation, and conflict resolution are vital parts of running any business, but many creatives have never learned the basics.
Deal or No Deal is a friendly introduction to the basics of better communication, practised in a safe environment, with practical exercises that focus on negotiation tactics, mediation, and conflict resolution.
This workshop is ideal for:
Creative freelancers, established practitioners, arts organisations.
People – Skills
Creative businesses have unique and challenging staffing needs – the requirement for talented and loyal people without the reliable turnover that can guarantee the services of an employee. We need a complicated combination of freelancers, interns, casual staff, and friends – so how should a creative business find and retain clever people? People : Skills is a practical workshop that details the value of position descriptions (including tips on how to write a compelling PD), how to interview and source references, using recruitment companies, booking freelancers, being a good boss and more.
This workshop is ideal for:
Creative freelancers, established practitioners, arts organisations.
Pitchface – Creative’s Guide to Pitching
Pitching is a necessary part of professional creative practice, whether it’s discussing an idea for a work, talking to funding bodies about a project, or participating in a competitive pitch process or competition. It’s fraught with legal and marketing challenges, and needs to be approached in a thoughtful and strategic way. Pitchface is a relaxed workshops that provides practical advice on how to tell your best story, how to protect your ideas, and simple tips and tricks to avoid the ‘elevator pitch’ and build lasting relationships with the people who can help bring your ideas to life.
This workshop is ideal for:
Creative freelancers, established practitioners, arts organisations.
Make Your Own Work
How often are creatives told to ‘make their own work’? And what exactly does it mean? Make Your Own Work takes a tough love approach to the job of producing a self-devised project, from the initial ideas stage through to completion. On the way we’ll examine the legal requirements, the role of a producer, challenges to watch out for, and tips to build a lasting career. It’s suitable for practitioners from every aspect of the arts, from screen to performance to visual art and more.
This workshop is ideal for:
Creative freelancers, established practitioners, arts organisations.
Creative Wellbeing
Working in the creative industries is both strenuous and rewarding. How can you maintain relative balance between flourishing and falling, particularly when your output is built with emotion? Creative Wellbeing explores ways that creative professionals can purposely bring wellbeing practice into their everyday lives. Led by a creative industries specialist and wellbeing guru, this interactive workshop is an appraisal of your wellness agenda, so you can remain creative for the long term.
This workshop is ideal for:
Creative freelancers, established practitioners, arts organisations.
Cultural Tourism
For small-to-medium cultural and creative organisations, cultural tourism can also be an effective way of generating revenue, connecting with community, and helping to define a region or place as a cultural and artistic destination.
In this practical workshop, participants will learn how to maximise the special attributes that set their organisation apart from others, including their history, traditions, arts and culture.
This workshop is ideal for:
This workshop is ideal for: small-to-medium cultural and creative organisations.
Helping Hands – Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers
Recruiting and retaining volunteers is critically important for small arts and cultural organisations, but it can also be difficult for under-resourced groups without the capacity for a recruitment strategy. Helping Hands is a bespoke workshop, tailored to the needs of each locally based cultural NFP, which focuses on finding creative and realistic ways of recruiting and retaining volunteers while also working with the issues of limited capacity and resources, time and money.
This workshop is ideal for:
This workshop is ideal for small arts and cultural organisations and NFPs.
Creative Social Enterprise
A social enterprise is a business that sells services and products with the specific intention of tackling a social problem, improving their community, helping specific groups of people, or enhancing environmental sustainability. A social enterprise could be an existing company, a new organisation, or a dedicated sole trader – but what does it all mean? And what’s the point? This workshop looks at the basic regulations of a social enterprise, the challenges of certification, and a practical look at whether becoming a social enterprise is the right next step for you.
This workshop is ideal for:
This workshop is ideal for arts organisations and purpose-led businesses.
